<i>The </i>Piers Plowman <i>Electronic Archive, vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm<sup>2</sup>)</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2) Lawrence Warner The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2). Edited by Michael Calabrese, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre. Cambridge: Published for The Medieval Academy of America and the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts by Boydell & Brewer, 2008. CD-ROM. $60. Michael Calabrese, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre have done full justice to the Piers Plowman texts of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Hm 128. A major benefit of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA), of course, is its provision of full-color digital facsimiles of the manuscripts, but even more useful to the scholar is the XML-encoded transcription, accessible via either the default “JR viewer” or Eugene Lyman’s more advanced “Elwood viewer.” The latter enables extraordinarily sophisticated searches. Within a minute or so, an enterprising user can, for instance, generate a spreadsheet indicating how many terms with a medial oe appear in each passus. And then there is the edition’s interpretive material, in the editors’ Introduction to Hm/Hm2, which addresses all the major textual, codicological, paleographical, and linguistic features of the manuscript. This Introduction, on which my review focuses, is a major feat of medieval scholarship. It would, for instance, serve as a wonderful introduction to textual and manuscript studies for students, and it shows seasoned scholars, too, what is to be gained from this sort of careful and sustained attention to single documents. In Part I the editors thoroughly describe the manuscript, which comprises six items, in six main hands plus that of a rubricator/corrector: Prick of Conscience, the fragment of Piers Plowman called Hm2 (i.e., Kane-Donaldson 2.208–3.72), Expositio sequentiarum, the main Piers Plowman text, The Siege of Jerusalem, and How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter. The most important section of Part I concerns the sequence of the manuscript’s construction, concluding that Piers Plowman “was left unrubricated for a long while” but that “some sort of rather loose collaborative effort informed the production of this manuscript in the (probably religious) community in which it was created” (I.6). One error is the editors’ claim that “Kane and Donaldson propose that some kind of ‘historical division’ existed after fol. 97,” which, we are told, recent discoveries by Ralph Hanna and David Lawton have disproved. In fact Kane and Donaldson, too, dismiss this “proposal,” arguing instead, as the PPEA editors had acknowledged at the beginning of the paragraph, for “a common and contemporaneous origin for items 1, 2 and 4, and therefore also for 5 and 6.” Part II, on “The Text,” has by far the richest analysis available of the myriad problems presented by Hm/Hm2. Calabrese, Duggan, and Turville-Petre’s discussion of the odd dislocation whereby the text reads K-D 11.425–12.81 / 11.218–424 / 11.111–217 is intelligent and fascinating, especially in pointing out that “the new junctures are grammatical and make local sense” (II.1.2), which seems to have prevented any early readers from noticing the error. The account of Hm2’s [End Page 538] production is full and reliable. There is an extensive catalogue of the correcting hands in the manuscript, of whom the individual who also rubricated Piers Plowman is most prominent. This, together with the account of the manuscript’s production, is the heart of the edition, and indeed the two topics, as becomes clear in this section, are intimately related. But the edition is somewhat confused about the nature of the evidence it brings to bear on these important questions, so we will need to take a few moments to sort things out. The editors refreshingly acknowledge one source of the confusion, though they could have done more to prevent it. At stake is a relatively straightforward question: was the rubricator/corrector’s exemplar the same one used by the two main hands at work on the Piers Plowman texts? The edition initially argues—and this is certainly Turville-Petre, since this is based on a 2002...